Talk:Eduardo Caruso
HT had plenty of opportunities to have Eduardo give an expositional speech stating exactly what the POD was. It's so irritating that he didn't.JonathanMarkoff (talk) 05:34, August 13, 2016 (UTC) :I suspect there isn't just one POD as such. Really, multiple things would have had to have gone the USSR's way, and most of those changes would have to be very subtle, and Caruso wouldn't have been the best vehicle to explain them. HT knows this, which is probably why he went with the structure he did, and why we don't have a Galt-length speech from Caruso, instead focusing on a couple of points (Cuba and Vietnam) that give us some idea of what was different, but leaving open the possibility that there's a lot more to it than that. TR (talk). ::He could have at least specified the initial POD. That's the way Crosstimers usually think, except when they don't know the POD as in TVWW.JonathanMarkoff (talk) 03:58, August 14, 2016 (UTC) :::It's the odd man out for XTime and HT's AH canon in general. But a generalized subtle shift in culture is a perfectly valid way to do AH. Perhaps a superior way to the usual: For want of a nail, the battle may be lost, but if for want of a battle an empire falls, we can assume the empire would not have endured through the ages if the necessary nail had been found. If the empire was too fragile to absorb the reversals a lost battle presented, something else would have gotten it sooner or later. Me, I'd rather consider why some empires can come back from a lost battle and others cannot. Turtle Fan (talk) 04:08, August 14, 2016 (UTC) ::::Crosstimers think that way, but they don't discuss it that way. Paul Gomes reflects on the POD to himself in Curious Notions, but he doesn't tell Lucy Chen "Well, the Russians mobilized slowly in 1914 in your world, and Germany could implement the Schlieffen Plan successfully, but in my world, they moved much faster than the Germans expected, and so the war went on for four years." HT has Caruso acting consistently with his other X-timers in that regard. And as TF and I both said, the changes may be so subtle that Caruso doesn't know of all of them, or can't explain a through-line to people who are probably not going to be familiar enough with that sort of minutiae given the ideological nature of their education to understand just what he's saying. ::::I freely admit I may be completely wrong in my assessment of HT's intent. The POD could be as presented, that essentially the domino theory was legit, and that Jack Kennedy tipped over the first domino by backing down over Cuba, while leaving the Jupiters in Italy and Turkey in place. It seems out of character for JFK, but it's not impossible, and I'm not sure why leaving MAD in place proves what a paper tiger the USA is to the Europeans. ::::But I find it strange that if this were the case that Nikita Khrushchev does not get a little more credit. Cuba was not the only reason for Nikita's ouster, but it certainly helped. If that's taken off the table, then it would seem the guy who promised to bury the west and essentially did it would be better loved. Moreover, Stalin has been rehabilitated, implicitly at Khrushchev's expense. Putin could be the x-factor in that equation. Stalin's been getting some rehabilitation under Putin in OTL, so that happening in TGlad seems consistent. ::::Nor is it clear to me why withdrawing from Vietnam in 1968 (seven years early), when the war was already unpopular at home and abroad, should send the same message. The US sticking around in Indochina for a few years didn't stop the Khmer Rouge, for example. Plus you have the obvious questions about how the US public felt in 1964--couldn't a GOP candidate gain a little more traction in light of JFK's perceived weakness? Couldn't the same thing happen in 1968? ::::In the end, HT's decision to use to native POVs has always struck me as "pointed", and not just a bit of authorial pique. That, coupled with the nature of Soviet ideology and propaganda, it's just always "felt" like HT was doing a certain amount of handwaving and acknowledging that it would have required much more than just these two things to get the USSR on the winning side. TR (talk) 17:19, August 14, 2016 (UTC)